School Boards from Newark, Paterson Demand Return of Local Control

Correction appended March 16

In a rare joint meeting, the school advisory boards of Newark and Paterson Thursday discussed strategies to restore local control to the districts, including staging a Trenton protest and supporting a pending lawsuit and initiating another against the state education bureaucracy that has run the cities’ schools for decades.

“The experiment has not worked. It has proven to be inefficient. It has proven to be ineffective,” Christopher Irving, president of the Paterson school board, said to the audience gathered at Science Park High School.

“State control has been a dreadful failure. The idea that people in Trenton know what’s better for our students than the people on the ground in Newark, in Jersey City, in Paterson, is paternalistic and it’s wrong,” said another Paterson board member, Jonathan Hodges.

School officials from Jersey City, the third district managed by the state Department of Education, were invited to attend the session but couldn’t due to conflicts, said Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, the president of the Newark school advisory board. Jersey City officials, however, support the effort, Baskerville-Richardson also said.

The three districts are the biggest in New Jersey, and each serves very large populations of black and Hispanic students. Unlike virtually every other school system in the state, the trio’s elected boards of education have largely advisory roles, with no voting power over many aspects of district managment. Each of the districts’ superintendents, including Newark schools chief Cami Anderson, are appointed by state officials and not by the boards.

Beginning in 1989 with Jersey City*, each of the districts were taken over by the state due to low student performance, financial problems and other issues. Paterson was next, and Newark lost local control in 1995. 

Since then, however, school officials and local lawmakers say performance has improved dramatically in the districts, which are assessed according to the “quality single accountability continuum,” or QSAC. Under this system, districts are evaluated in a number of areas, including curriculum and governance. QSAC, which was revamped in 2005, applies to all the state’s school districts and now has a mechanism where local control can be restored entirely or partly if a district scores high enough in a given area.

Instead, said state Sen. Ron Rice, state officials in recent years have manipulated the assessments in an attempt to keep the districts under Trenton’s thumb.

“The QSAC was to be an evaluation tool, but it was also intended to prevent the state from taking over a district in totality,” Rice said.

Rice has called for a federal investigation into the state’s attempt to maintain control of the schools but admitted that effort has so far been unsuccessful.

More promising has been litigation filed by the Newark advisory board, said David Sciarra of the Education Law Center, a Newark-based advocacy group. In 2011, Newark’s school system achieved scores of at least 80 in a number of QSAC areas -- high enough to be considered passing and to trigger a return to local control in those areas.

One of those key areas is “governance,” which, if returned to local control, would mean Newark’s advisory board would have a much more hands-on managerial role, closer to that of a traditional school board. But despite a score of 89, state education commissioner Chris Cerf refused to surrender the state's authority, prompting the Newark advisory board to appeal. A judge is expected to hear arguments regarding the matter “very soon,” Sciarra said.

Sciarra and other speakers also said there’s an inherent conflict of interest, since the state Department of Education is in charge of evaluating its own performance in running the districts. Speakers also said Newark and the other state-controlled districts have been singled out for unfair treatment.

“Millburn failed in four out of five QSAC areas, but the state didn’t come in and take over,” said Newark board member Alturrick Kenney.

Kenney also suggested board members and the public protest the state Board of Education meeting next month in Trenton.

*The original version of this article misstated the date of Jersey City's takeover.